I’m photographing pilgrims who come to see the relics of St Therese of Lisieux as they travel around the country.

Why?

I put together a pitch about the project to send out to a few people – the text is here.

Where I am

The tour ends on 16 October, so I’m still shooting, but as it is now largely going around the South East I’m spending a lot less time travelling.

I’ve started my the editing process, with an eye on getting down to around 200 or so images by the time I’m back at LCC. I’ve also been recording a lot of audio, and I’m in the process of sorting through that.

What I’ve been doing

There’s been a lot of press coverage of the tour, and a lot of news photography (see here, here and here) for examples.

So while I’ve got lots of shots of people venerating the relics, more recently I’ve been concentrating on interviewing and portraits of pilgrims. The pilgrims, rather than the relics themselves, are very much the focus for me – although there’s other elements (the ‘backstage’ stuff, the media circus, commercialism, ceremony) that I’ve also looked at.

There have been other photographers at every venue – either local and national press, or the Catholic Church’s own photographer – so in some ways I’ve been able to guide myself by doing what other people are not.

What I’m going to do

I’d like to produce a book, or at least a layout, with a mix of portraits and reportage shots. Before I started the project, I thought about doing this chronologicaly – basically with one or two shots from each venue. But now I think this is probably the least interesting way to structure things. I also found that some places have produced many more images that I’d like to use. So I need to think about a more thematic way of doing this.

I’d also like to use the audio I’ve recorded and produce some multimedia – perhaps in the form of a website, rather than a slideshow with audio (in effect this might mean a lot of mini-slideshows linked together in a non-linear fashion). I’d like to tie this into the book.